Pandoc Reference
Installing Pandoc
To install Pandoc in your CodeAnywhere DevBox, use the following command:
sudo apt-get install pandoc
If you are going to be compiling a document with citations then you will also want to install pandoc-citeproc:
sudo apt-get install pandoc-citeproc
Et voila. Installed.
Basic Pandoc commands
All Pandoc commands are documented here: http://pandoc.org/README.html
Convert a Markdown file to HTML:
pandoc -o example.html example.md
Pandoc reads the filetype from the extension in normal usage. If you want to convert a file directly from a URL, you will have to specify the filetype, like this:
pandoc -f html -t markdown http://inls161.johndmart.in/syllabus/
You can make sure that certain things, like quotes and em-dashes, get read and formatted propery by specifying the "Smart" switch (a capital -S or --smart):
pandoc -S -o example.html example.md
There are a host of other commands in the documentation. Be sure to try them out.
Specific file commands
Convert your markdown to HTML:
pandoc -o example.html exampld.md
If you wish to convert to a DOCX or ODT file:
pandoc -o example.docx example.md
pandoc -o example.odt example.md
If you wish to convert between two different word processor filetypes, we might have to get a little creative. We learned in class that if we issue the following command, we get errors related to file encoding and the conversion will not work.
pandoc -o example.docx example.odt
If, however, we add an intermediary step, say through HTML, we can get the output that we want. Try it like this instead:
pandoc -o example.docx example-tmp.html && pandoc -o example.odt example-tmp.html
This preserves the formatting and extracts the text from the DOCX as an HTML file and then converts that HTML into ODT. We do not have the weird encoding errors this way, and we don't have to mess with pipes.
Filter a document through a template file:
pandoc -S --reference-docx=FILE -o example.docx example.md
In the above command, you need to specify the location of the template file.
If it is a file called template.docx and is located in the same directory as your Markdown source, then the command will be:
pandoc -S --reference-docx=./template.docx -o example.docx example.md
You can also use an ODT or OTT for reference:
pandoc -S --reference-odt=./template.ott -o example.odt example.md